glanced at him once or twice from beneath her drooping eyelids, and wondered what he thought of song and singers. He rose when it was over, and thanked them. "You used to sing to me a long while ago,"

he said to Effie. "I remember once, when you came to see me, we had 'Little Bo-peep.""

"Oh, I remember that! And you picked me some flowers, Mr. Lauriston."

"That's very touching," he said; "I remember the song, and you remember the bouquet with which I applauded it. I'm sorry the flowers are not quite so close at hand to-night."

"But you used to sing too, and play-I recollect your playing," said

Mrs. Eastwood.

"I

very seldom sing," he answered. "I play a little now and then." "Play something to us now," Effie exclaimed.

He sat down without a word, glanced quickly round the room, and began. Mrs. Eastwood took up her knitting, Fanny turned the leaves of the nearest book, and Effie, catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, gazed at the pretty little figure in a pale blue dress, while her hand stole softly upward to push the straying rings of hair from her forehead. Miss Conway, heeding nothing but the music, turned towards Mr. Lauriston with brightening eyes, and lips half parted in a smile. He was playing a quaint, light, old-fashioned tune, which seemed to call again to shadowy life the courtly beaux and belles of some forgotten ball-room. To Rachel's ear there were thin, faint notes of sadness in it, because the dancers had so long ago grown weary, and the sprightly measure had a lonely sound, having wandered onward into these later years where their feet could not follow it. They were all dead and gone, and their music was sounding still, under Mr. Lauriston's slim fingers. To some such tune as this might his young wife have danced, masquerading as an Arcadian shepherdess, as Charley saw her in her picture. Rachel's thoughts turned vaguely to that beautiful woman who was now only a shadow lingering on the outskirts of Mr. Lauriston's life. Did he love her passionately two years before?—had his leisurely speech been quickened to eager earnestness for her?-did she know the meaning of those doubtful smiles and glances which puzzled Rachel? The music came back again and yet again, as if it mocked her questions with an ever-recurring answer which she could not understand, and Mr. Lauriston turned his head and looked at her for a moment as he played. Her eyes fell before his, and followed the white hands passing deftly over the keys, while the candlelight flashed on his ring. It seemed to her as if she lost all reckoning of the time during which those busy fingers moved, insisting clearly on the silvery notes which marked the pulses of the dance. But all at once they slackened, glided through some lingering cadences, paused, and Mr. Lauriston rose from the piano. "Where did you pick that jolly old thing up? It is old, isn't it?" said Eastwood, breaking through the polite chorus of "Thank you!" which came as readily as a response in church.

"Yes, it's old-I have known it a long while," Mr. Lauriston replied. Miss Conway would have liked to ask him whether he had danced to it a century or so before, and learned its meaning so.

"I like it!" said Charley energetically. "It's quite new to me." "Very pretty," Mrs. Eastwood chimed in, looking up from her knitting. "So lively and sparkling, and, if I may say so, Mr. Lauriston, very beautifully played."

He acknowledged the compliment with a smile and a little bow, and crossed over to where she sat, remaining there during a song of Miss Conway's. But after a few minutes, when the others were at the piano again, he came back, and, pausing by Rachel's side, said softly," Mrs. Eastwood has been promising and vowing in your name."

"In mine?"

"Yours was included. I shall be out to-morrow morning, I have to see some of my tenants, and I leave Redlands on Friday, so that I have very little time. But Mrs. Eastwood has been kind enough to promise for you all, that you will come and dine with me to-morrow evening. I hope you consider yourself bound?"

"Certainly," she answered with a smile. "I shall like to be introduced to the elegant modern mansion. And then," she hesitated a little," then I hope you will play to us again, Mr. Lauriston. I liked very much."

that

"Ah !" he said, "I thought I had been fortunate enough to choose something that pleased you. Miss Conway, if I may ask the question, how came you to know these good friends of ours?"

"We were at school together. Of course I was a big girl when Effie was one of the little ones."

"A school-girl friendship-I see," he said. Both words and tone were harmless enough, and yet Miss Conway suspected something of contempt underlying them. She had an uneasy feeling that Mr. Lauriston must look down on the Eastwoods, and was defiantly inclined to identify herself with them. "It began with a school-girl friendship," she said.

"And has gone on to something more. Eastwood has a good voice, hasn't he?" Mr. Lauriston remarked after a pause. Rachel assented warmly, though she had never been so keenly aware of every defect in Charley's performance.

That night, as the girls went up to bed, they talked of their visitor. “Effie,” said Rachel doubtfully, "tell me, when you were little, were you really fond of Mr. Lauriston?"

"Why, yes, of course I was," said Effie. "He used to take me on his knee, and he was always giving me things, you know. And he never took any notice of Fanny."

Rachel smiled. Effie's feelings, though truthfully expressed, threw very little light upon her own.

3 Modern Solitary.

SENANCOUR, the author of Obermann, was born in Paris in the year 1770. His parents were in comfortable circumstances and able to give him a good education. He showed considerable precocity in his studies. When only seven years of age, he is said to have astonished his friends by his knowledge of geography and works of travel. This habit of study was connected with the want of bodily vigour which precluded him from the active employments of youth. He seems to have suffered from muscular weakness in the arms. In an interesting passage in Obermann, which may be pretty safely taken as autobiographical, he lets us see himself at this time. When fourteen he was taken by his parents to Fontainebleau. "After a childhood," he writes, "passed in the house, inactive and tedious, if I felt myself a man in certain respects I was a child in many others. Embarrassed, uncertain, glimpsing every possibility, yet knowing nothing; a stranger to that which surrounded me, I had no decided characteristic beside that of being restless and unhappy." On this visit he felt the attractions of the vast forest, and he recalls the impression that it was the only place he had ever wished to revisit. The following year he did revisit it, and now the far-reaching mysterious vistas of his forest-world drew him irresistibly. "I eagerly traversed these solitudes; I purposely went astray in them, content when I had lost every trace of my course, and could not perceive any frequented path. When I reached the outskirts of the forest, I saw with pain those vast naked plains and those steeples in the distance. I returned at once, I dived into the thickest part of the wood; and when I found a region bare of trees and shut in on all sides, where I could see nothing but sand and juniper trees, I had a feeling of peace, of liberty, of wild joy-the power of nature felt for the first time in the age which is easily made happy. Nevertheless, I was not gay; though almost happy, I only had the agitation of well-being. I fatigued myself while enjoying, and I always returned sad."

Such a nature was a soil well fitted for the seed of Rousseau's visionary ideas of a return to primitive life, and when only a lad he ardently entered into Rousseau's dream. When nineteen years old, he declined to go to the Séminaire de Saint Sulpice, where his father wished him to carry on his studies, and resolved, apparently with the connivance of his mother, to leave Paris for some quiet retreat in Switzerland. By a curious coincidence this synchronised with the time at which René, another disciple of Rousseau, exchanged society for solitude.

During the first part of his stay in Switzerland, he busied himself with painting, and did not attempt to write. He went to live with a family in Fribourg, and managed at the unripe age of twenty to get entangled in a marriage with the daughter of the house. He tells us in some notes about himself, which Sainte-Beuve has discovered, that his physical helplessness was the cause of his marrying. If, as SainteBeuve thinks, his experience is shadowed forth in that of Fonsalbe, narrated towards the end of Obermann, we may take it that the union was entered on in haste and repented at leisure. Troubles now fell thickly on our young wanderer. The Revolution pronounced him. suspect, and in consequence of this he lost the fortune to which he was heir. The Swiss Government, moreover, deprived him of the property which should have come to him through his wife. Two children were born to him. Then his wife succumbed to a long illness and died; and finally he appears to have been deprived of the custody of his children.

After a youth which, as he tells us, was full of trouble, Senancour took to writing. His first work, Rêveries sur la Nature primitive de l'homme, was published in 1799. It is clearly the work of a youthful rebel against society. It inveighs eloquently against the evils of social institutions, and grows bitter in its denunciations of Christianity, and religion in general. It betrays, too, a youthful confidence in prescribing remedies for social disease, exhorting men to carry out the teachings of the Stoics and of Rousseau combined, and so to rid themselves of the burden of modern existence. Owing to the din of the Revolution, this pagan gospel found no ears capable of listening; yet the young teacher went on undaunted. In 1804, there appeared his best-known work, Obermann, of which more will be said presently. Here it is enough to mention that it shows a softening of young rebelliousness, and a toning down of young assurance. The writer no longer prescribes for society with the old self-confidence. He appears less as a teacher of others and a social reformer than as an observer of his own nature and experience, and as an alleviator of the evils of his individual life.

We need not follow the author very closely through the rest of his life. At the Restoration (1814) he returned to Paris, and mixed in journalism. Among other publications which come from his pen, the most noteworthy is Libres Méditations d'un solitaire inconnu, which shows little of the early spirit of revolt against society, and is marked by a calm and more conciliatory tone. He died in 1846 after a long and painful illness.

Obermann is in appearance a number of letters addressed by a solitary, who is most of his time in Switzerland, to an unnamed friend. The dates and references give an air of reality to the correspondence. It is known, moreover, that there is a general agreement between the events narrated and the facts of Senancour's life. Yet the agreement fails in certain respects, the author seeming to have wished to conceal his personality. This fact, together with the absence of all knowledge

respecting the recipient of the letters, and an allusion or two to a public, seems to shut us up to the conclusion that the solitary chose the form of letter as the most appropriate for his purpose. And we may at once recognise this appropriateness. It serves as the natural prose vehicle for the outpourings of personal feeling, the confession of personal experience, which make up the chief part of the subject-matter. It is possible, indeed, that the writer was able to realise at the moment of writing that he was addressing some individual friend. At least, this idea naturally occurs to one when reading passages like the following: "If I were absolutely alone, these moments of restlessness would be intolerable; but I write, and it seems as if the task of expressing to you what I experience were a distraction which lightens the sense of it. To whom could I open myself up then? What other would bear the wearisome chatterings of a gloomy madman, of so futile a sensitiveness? It is my one pleasure to tell you what I can only tell to you, what I would not say to any other, what others would not understand."

It may be added that the epistolary form very well suits the intellect and habits of the writer. His is not a logical intellect, braced to follow out ideas to their remote conclusions. Thought with him is apt to be wandering and desultory, being ever swayed by changing currents of emotion. And this light discursive kind of reflection is just what we look for in the composition of a letter. Obermann gives us, then, just what the letters of a recluse to a sympathetic friend might be expected to give. They present in broad outline the few external incidents of the quietly flowing life; they paint its natural surroundings; they afford glimpses of its daily round of occupations; and lastly they record its strange inner experience, the mixed feelings, the yearnings, the dreamy musings which make up the chief part of the solitary's life.

It is not difficult to account for the fascination which the book has exercised on the few. There is a tone of sincerity in this long personal disclosure which arrests the attention. We feel that the writer is laying bare his very soul to our gaze. And what a soul is here laid bare! What a strange spiritual experience, this succession of momentary upheavings of aspiration and long swoonings of despair downwards to its deepest depths! Under all the wondrous pictures of nature, the vivid descriptions of mountain heights with their awful stillness and vastness of outlook, under all the reflections on man and the previsions of a happier destiny awaiting him afar off, there betrays itself the sensitive stricken soul of the writer with its fugitive flush of warm life, and its abiding cold pallor :

Yet through the hum of torrent lone,

And brooding mountain-bee,

There sobs I know not what ground-tone

Of human agony!

Such a revelation, while fitted to hold spell-bound the few, is not exactly